Location-aware technologies have the potential to revolutionize computing, cellular services, sensor networks, and many other commercial, military, and social applications. Localization may be used to find the location of wireless devices in a network. The network may include any number of wireless devices, known as agents, as well as a number of anchors. Anchors (e.g., cellular base stations) may typically
One known technique for determining the location of agents in a network is centralized localization. In centralized localization, each node (e.g., anchors and agents) in the network routes its collection of relative positioning measurements to a central processing unit. The central processing unit may determine the locations of all the nodes in the network using a set of measurements obtained from each node, for example, by employing an optimization function over the set of measurements.
The majority of current localization methods utilize another known localization technique referred to as non-cooperative localization. In a non-cooperative localization approach, there is no communication between agents; there only exists communication between agents and anchors. During the localization process, an agent may need to be in communication range with as many as three anchors in order to determine its location. Thus, in order for an agent to locate itself, a number of anchors may need to be employed in order to ensure each agent has access to enough data to determine its location. Thus, to locate all agents non-cooperative localization may require either a high density of anchors or long-range high-power anchor transmissions.
A third known technique of localization is cooperative localization. In cooperative localization, inter-agent communication is allowed, removing the need for all agents to be within communication range of multiple anchors. Therefore, agents may act as virtual anchors for other agents. Since every agent has more information available, cooperative localization may offer more accuracy and coverage.